Is Your Sustainable Procurement Program Oriented Toward Outcome and Impact?

Source: “Is Your Sustainable Procurement Program Oriented Toward Outcomes and Impact” Webinar by EcoVadis

Our society, planet, and markets are changing at a rapid rate, so we must ask ourselves if the sustainable efforts we’re making now are enough. Through a webinar titled: “Is Your Sustainable Procurement Program Oriented Toward Outcomes and Impact,” EcoVadis discussed that social and environmental outcomes must be in mind to make a procurement program sustainable.

Compliance is often the primary driver for companies to embark on a sustainable supply chain program. But in practice, most companies never move beyond a risk-based approach and use process indicators (e.g., number of audits undertaken) to measure performance.

Typical supply chain metrics used by companies to measure sustainability only look at input. However, the metric results of impact and outcome may prove that you want to change your strategy to reach compliance requirements or obtain sustainable practices – options you wouldn’t know to consider when results solely focused on the input of your program wouldn’t reveal such information. Focusing on impacts and outcomes can help to break away from the resource intensive approach of the past.

The webinar goes on to discuss how if full potential for outcome and impact can be reached through your procurement program, sustainability can be reached and enable you to become a truly purpose driven company. With this goal in mind, create a vision to support the company’s strategic objectives and develop a program to realize it. Focus on the change you’d like to achieve, target issues that matter, build alliances and partnerships, leverage supplier knowledge and expertise and finally, identify, pilot, and embrace digital.

These practices are obtainable and realistic and the best way to instill sustainable efforts in your company is by working with HR to integrate sustainability training at every level. To learn more, watch the full webinar here.